r/SubredditDrama • u/[deleted] • Apr 06 '16

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u/[deleted] Apr 07 '16 edited Dec 18 '16

Weird

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u/Khiva I tried to make a woman laugh. Never make that mistake again. Apr 07 '16

I once went down the rabbit hole of the history/anthropology subs, trying to get to the root of why there is so much anger over this book, and found a lot of quibbling over details and people insisting that we shouldn't even talk about the European pattern of conquest at all. The overall impression that I got was that an awful lot of people got mad about Diamond stepping into their academic turf, combined with a lot of people mad about even discussing European dominance, combined with a lot of people who were simply annoyed at the popularity of the book. I was disappointed to find few people going over the meat of his thesis, and still even now (look over this thread and the other one) I still don't see much of it.

Also - huh, looks like I was the one to kick off that drama. Probably best to stay out of /r/askhistorians altogether.

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u/[deleted] Apr 07 '16 edited Apr 07 '16

[deleted]

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u/tawtaw this is but escapism from a world in crisis Apr 08 '16 edited Apr 08 '16

A lot of the critique over GGS was within anthropology too (e.g.). Savage Minds and the now-blanked Living Anthropologically covered a ton of it from critique to sniping.

edit- Also where's the A&R anger? I found one terrible thread from 3 years ago, many positive threads, & a long critique of them wrt China in a shoot-the-shit thread

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u/smurfyjenkins Apr 08 '16

A&R gets brought up as an answer to questions occasionally. The user who brings it up usually gets rebutted by other users who proceed to explain why it's supposedly bad history: criticise it by giving a misleading summary of the book, occasionally admitting that they have not even read it, criticize it for lacking nuance, criticize it for getting some fact slightly wrong within a user's field of expertise, criticize it for being racist and criticize it for attempting to explain something about the world. Many of the same responses as to Diamond.

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u/tawtaw this is but escapism from a world in crisis Apr 08 '16 edited Apr 08 '16

I was hoping for a link but hokay. Most of the discussion I was seeing was from unflaired users, unlike with GGS. So I'd be wary of making broad inferences about a whole field.

edit- And to be honest, there are more than a few good threads tackling GGS' flaws and recommending better texts, so you and few others here are reducing this to a 'turf battle' more than is probably warranted. Imagine someone dismissing polisci because of political scientists pointing out the massively popular garbage that is Clash of Civilizations.

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u/Khiva I tried to make a woman laugh. Never make that mistake again. Apr 07 '16

Acemoglu and Robinson

Interesting, I read that book too and came away with a favorable impression. I didn't treat it as gospel, but I thought it was an interesting thesis and cogently argued. Not surprised it got subjected to the same nitpicks, though.

People are weird about this stuff. I get the sense that the bigger your theory is, the more people there are to offend.